The goal of The Workshop on Online Abuse and Harms (WOAH) is to advance research that develops, interrogates and applies computational methods for detecting, classifying and modelling online abuse.

WOAH 7 is colocated with the 61st Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL’23) which will take place in Toronto, Canada from July 9th to July 14th, 2023.

Background

Digital technologies have brought many benefits for society, transforming how people connect, communicate and interact with each other. However, they have also enabled abusive and harmful content such as hate speech and harassment to reach large audiences, and for their negative effects to be amplified. The sheer amount of content shared online means that abuse and harm can only be tackled at scale with the help of computational tools. However, detecting and moderating online abuse and harms is a difficult task, with many technical, social, legal and ethical challenges. The Workshop on Online Abuse and Harms (WOAH) invites paper submissions from a wide range of fields, including natural language processing, machine learning, computational social sciences, law, politics, psychology, sociology and cultural studies. We explicitly encourage interdisciplinary submissions, technical as well as non-technical submissions, and submissions that focus on under-resourced languages. We also invite non-archival submissions and civil society reports. The topics covered by WOAH include, but are not limited to:

• New models or methods for detecting abusive and harmful online content;
• Biases and limitations of existing detection models or datasets for abusive and harmful online content, particularly those in commercial use;
• New datasets and taxonomies for online abuse and harms;
• Dynamics of online abuse and harms, as well as their impact on different communities
• Social, legal, and ethical implications of detecting, monitoring and moderating online abuse

In addition, we invite submissions related to the theme for this seventh edition of WOAH, which will be subjectivity and disagreement in abusive language data. Hate speech and other forms of abuse are highly subjective. By choosing this theme, we want to encourage submissions that analyse, address or make use of this subjectivity. To match the theme and complement thematic submissions, we have invited a strong lineup of relevant speakers.

Latest News

TBA.

Organizers

• Yi-Ling Chung, The Alan Turing Institute

• Aida Mostafazadeh Davani, Google Research

• Debora Nozza, Bocconi University

• Paul Röttger, University of Oxford

• Zeerak Talat, Digital Democracies Institute, Simon Fraser University

Sponsors

TBA. If you or your organisation would like to support WOAH, please get in touch!

Contact

If you have any questions, please let us know at organizers@workshopononlineabuse.com